You Wrote the Law. Now Someone Else Will Implement It.

You advocated for a law. Maybe you even wrote it. But now someone in the executive branch has to actually implement it — and that person has different incentives, different knowledge, and different values than you do.

I'll give a short talk on two examples I've been up close to — federal hiring (veterans' preference and direct hire) and the AI use-case inventory — and how the versions that reached me weren't what their designers had in mind. The argument: if you're writing policy, price in the people who'll be making it happen. Know who they are before you write. And think about whether you want the degraded version of what you're asking for is still worth it.

After the talk, we'll open it up for discussion.